New York, Sep 7 (IANS): The Urban Services Monitoring System (UrSMS) in Surat, Gujarat has been selected as a "Project to Watch" in the Big Data Climate Challenge competition at the United Nations.

The project was developed by a consultancy, TARU, in collaboration with Surat Municipal Corporation and Urban Health Climate Resilience Center (UHCRC) in India. It is designed to improve monitoring of health, water supply, sewerage and solid waste services and deal with citizen's complaints incorporating a mobile phone text messaging system, according to the project's web site. It also has the capacity to be upgraded to deal with emergencies like floods.

The competition is part of the run-up to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Climate Summit to be held on September 23. The two winners of the competition, announced last Wednesday, were a forest monitoring system, Global Forest Watch, from the World Resources Institute and an agriculture decision-making tool for Colombian rice farmers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Besides UrSMS, six other programs were selected as projects to watch.